The Philippines' Most Expensive White Elephant

The Bataan Nuclear Plant

"Located on a cliff overlooking the ocean in Morong, Bataan is one of the most — if not the most — expensive projects undertaken by the Philippine government.  The price tag to build the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) was originally $500 million for two 620-megawatt reactors.  Indeed, it would have been the biggest nuclear power plant in Southeast Asia at that time.  The project was started in 1976 and completed in 1984 at a cost of $2.3 billion!

Today, BNPP has not produced a single watt of electricity.  However, the government has been paying interest on the loan at a staggering amount of $155,000 a day.  That’s a lot ofmoolah! To put it in perspective, that’s enough money to build 50,000 Gawad Kalinga homes a year for 30 years, which would provide housing for more than 7,000,000 poor Filipinos.  That was just the interest.  You factor in the loan principal and another 10,000,000 poor Filipinos would have houses.  That’s 20% of the total population of the country."  

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White Elephant

A white elephant is an idiom for a valuable but burdensome possession of which its owner cannot dispose and whose cost (particularly cost of upkeep) is out of proportion to its usefulness or worth. From the story that the kings of Siam (now Thailand) were accustomed to make a present of one of these animals to courtiers who had rendered themselves obnoxious, in order to ruin the recipient by the cost of its maintenance. In modern usage, it is an object, scheme, business venture, facility, etc., considered to be without use or value.

The term derives from the sacred white elephants kept by Southeast Asian monarchs in Burma, Thailand,^[2] Laos and Cambodia. To possess a white elephant was regarded (and is still regarded in Thailand and Burma) as a sign that the monarch reigned with justice and power, and that the kingdom was blessed with peace and prosperity. The tradition derives from tales which associate a white elephant with the birth of the Buddha, as his mother was reputed to have dreamed of a white elephant presenting her with a lotus flower, a symbol of wisdom and purity, on the eve of giving birth.^[3]Because the animals were considered sacred and laws protected them from labor, receiving a gift of a white elephant from a monarch was simultaneously both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because the animal was sacred and a sign of the monarch's favour, and a curse because the animal had to be retained and could not be put to much practical use, but cost a significant amount to maintain.


Source: Wikipedia